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Debra Ruh:Hello everyone. This is Debra Ruh and you are listening to or watching Human Potential at Work. And today, we’re going to sort of turn the tables. A lot of you realize that I have a new book out. It’s called “Inclusion Branding” and it’s really a book that has been written really encouraging corporate brands and other brands really to engage with the community of people with disabilities.So, today Doug is going to interview me about the book and this is Doug’s idea and I really appreciated this and I thought, “Okay.” So, let’s talk about the book because I really do think it’s an important book even though I wrote it so. But the editors Camille and Michelle from Michelle…Doug:Shout out to Michelle Vandepas. Yes.Debra:Vandepas, yes. What a wonderful team and what wonderful editors so they get a big big credit for it too. So, I’m going to turn the show over to Doug and turn off my ringer on my phone at the same time.Doug:That’s great. No no I… so yes Debra, I mean, let’s start with the idea of… I guess the first question I want to ask you is sort of a Simon Sinek’s start with the why question. Why a book about inclusion branding?Debra:Well, one thing that I saw is when I had my old company TechAccess and TechAccess was a technology, a for profit technology company and most of my employees were technologist with disability. And I’ll be honest with you, most of those individuals were self-taught because unfortunately in the United States, education wasn’t very accessible. Certainly, college wasn’t very accessible and when a lot of these people were coming up through school. And so, that company was created in 2001 and then I merged with Level Access which used to be SSB in 2011.One thing I started to notice though, I was noticing as we were helping corporations become accessible; your websites have to be accessible, your intranets, your software applications, everything has to be accessible. One thing I started noticing in talking to my clients, they were almost treated as… and somebody said this once to me… well, Michael Takamura from HP said, “you know Debra, it’s almost like I’m running a nonprofit inside this big corporation.” And HP has always been very very good about inclusion and accessibility. They have been from the beginning, HP was a leader so heads off to HP. But I was thinking about that at the time and then I started really asking around to some other clients and saying … and making this comment to him and we found that many of them were, they’re very dedicated, they did have a budget but it was a very small budget and they had to defend their budget. Very typical things you always do in a corporation but I thought that what was really missing from these conversations was some solid marketing and branding. And it just really stuck with me and I kept thinking about that and when I created Ruh Global communications, that was why I did it. And so, I just really believe that corporate brands need to tell communities their stories and you need to engage with the communities.Now, the community of course that I love and I’m part of you know is the community of people with disabilities but when I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure that a community really… that you could use the information on this book regardless of what community you wanted to support. So you could almost take this advice and you could use it to support LGBT community or…Doug:Right. It doesn’t only have to be the disability community by any means…Debra:No.Doug:Right.Debra:Right. I just used this as another way to introduce. Continue to introduce the value of the community of people with disabilities to these brands but that was the goal.Doug:How would you define inclusion branding? Can you say a little bit about… so you know, we’re going to talk about inclusion branding today. How would you define it?Debra:Well, how I would define it is that once again, any kind of marketing and branding that you do. Anything that you’re doing; you’re engaging with communities, you’re doing commercials, you’re doing case studies or best practices, you’re doing marketing communications, you need to make sure that it’s inclusive in the biggest sense of the world. That you’re using models or actors that have visible disabilities in this case so that we can see that you deliberately are including us and we have some wonderful examples of that in the book. Tommy Hilfiger, who created adaptive clothing line and the models that they’ve used are appropriately beautiful people because…Doug:Right.Debra:Generally models are beautiful people.Doug:Right.Debra:But all of their models also happen to be beautiful people with physical disabilities that can be seen. Of course when we’re talking about disabilities, you know, there are many disabilities that are invisible disabilities or hidden disabilities that can’t be seen and in this particular case, you don’t want to use necessarily those models because we can’t visually look at you and tell that you have a disability. So…Doug:Right.Debra:If you’re trying to make a point to us through your advertising…Doug:We have to be able to see that.Debra:We have to be able to see it. We have to see… like Target. There’s so many wonderful examples but Target has been using children with disabilities in some of their branding commercials and stuff. There’s a Halloween commercial that comes to mind. But others or summer catalogues and stuff like that.So, inclusive branding to me is making sure that all of your marketing, all of your outward facing PR, everything you’re doing that you really deliberately including everyone including people with disabilities and I often don’t see it. and I’ll tell you, when I’m watching commercials and this is something that’s important to me but it’s important to a lot of other families that have members with disabilities as well. I will look at a commercial and I’ll say, “Okay, good. Great. Okay. You’ve got African Americans in there…” Looking from the US lens, “you’ve got African American. O good, you have Asia in there, you have males, you have females.” And I keep waiting for you to also include my community.Doug:That’s a good segue into communities. I mean, when that person said to you, “I feel like I’m running a nonprofit inside my company.” There’s something dysfunctional about that to me. Right? About that idea.Debra:Right.Doug:So instead, maybe we could be building community. Can you say a little bit about A… like let’s start with like why would a brand want to build communities?Debra:Okay. Yes. And why would a brand want to build communities. Well, anyone that has been paying any attention understands that marketing and branding and social media and the way we consume information and as we’re consuming the information; before, we would watch television and you would present the commercials to me and I had no choice but to watch these commercials. Now I’m telling my age but, I mean, when I was a little kid, you had you know, for channels and you watch the commercials unless you use commercial time to go to the restroom or to grab something to eat.Doug:Right.Debra:Right. So you had in a way captive audience. Well, the way we all consume data; it has changed. It has really really changed. And so, getting your messages across to the community to different people, it’s a very very different animal these days.And so, why should brands care about communities? Because if you are advertising like you know, we now take sponsors for this show for example, to make better commercial. I mean, there are different ways that brands can get involved to make sure communities are hearing them and which is one reason why market influencers are becoming more in play but at the same time, if you pay me to be your market influencer, am I giving… am I really giving an honest opinion?Doug:Right.Debra:So, for example, there have been situations where, I’m just going to use Kim Kardashian just because she’s a well-known figure but, if somebody gives her a very beautiful dress and she said, “I love this dress.” But they paid her for the dress, does she really loved it? So you just have that extra, mm-hmm, are you…Doug:Yes.Debra:So, the brands or the corporate brands, just looking from the lens of corporate brands right now. The corporate brands are really trying to figure out how to tell us what they’re doing.Doug:Yes.Debra:Assures they’re good brands because they know that’s important to everyone but especially the millennials so we talk about that in the book. But you know, how do you tell us your story? How do you tell us what your products are? How do you assure us that you are a good corporation that we should support? And even if the brand is business to business instead of business to consumer; they still need their image to be…Everybody wants a good image, it’s just very important. There’s a lot of reasons why you want a good image including being the employer of choice and there’s a lot of other reasons beyond just a consumer relationship. So, the way these days corporations can get their messages out, that they’re good brands. They’re good corporate brands and they’re making a difference in their communities are by engaging with their communities.Doug:Right. Makes a lot of sense. So let’s say a little bit about, how do you go about starting… I mean, we’re not going to give people the whole book. I mean I just want to say first of all that we’re just touching the surface now. But I just want to say this, this comes from the book, “Inclusion Branding” which recently released and I encourage people to go ahead and check out the book because we’re just touching on… you know scratching the surface of what’s on the book. But, I do want to ask you, can you give us a few ideas about how we can start to build community? Also I just want to say really quickly to remind people as well, buy the book, review the book. The reviews really help us to get the word out.Debra:Yes. They really…Doug:So, we want to make sure to say that. So yes Debra, how… can you say a little bit about the how of building community?Debra:Yes. I remember when I was writing the book. I talked about Michelle and Camille helping with the editing but, I also sent it to some of the people… I sent it to an audience before it was released. And one gentleman had said to me… I have a section in the book on social media and it really talks about following people back and engaging and all the different pieces that go with social media even though, even since the book came out in May, a couple of weeks ago. Things have changed dramatically on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a lot happening with these social media mediums. But I have a section there that talks about really engaging with communities and gives tips and he said… he read it and he said, “I think everybody knows a lot of these information Debra. They know that they need to engage on social media. They know if there’s a problem they have to come out and talk about the problem they just can’t hide. They know that they have to respond to their customer.” And I was like…Doug:No they don’t.Debra:No they don’t. They definitely don’t. I meet brands every day; they’re so confused what to do. They’re terrified. They’re just terrified because they’re afraid of a misstep. And if you have a miss… and everybody’s heard really scary stories. There was a story of a young woman that worked for a very big corporate brand and she was flying over to the Middle East and…Doug:Oh yes.Debra:She made a little smart aleck comments. She was just being cheeky on her little social media feed but she hashtagged something and it went viral and while she was on her flight to the Middle East, her feed was blowing up. And sometimes when your feed is blowing up you’re like, “yay!” and sometimes you’re like, “o no.”Doug:Yes. And that’s…Debra:And that… it was an o no for her so she is no longer with that company. And corporations have been trying for years to balance their employees being on social media and talking about them and talking about the communities they support…Doug:Right.Debra:And your employees can be your best allies but if an employee starts going rogue on you… I had a blessing to speak at the State department, at the State department library the other day and just had a real cool factor associated with it. I was talking to my contact at the State department and we were talking about some of these issues and he said there have actually been individuals that were invited to the US speaker program like I’ve been invited that sort of loss their tempers on social media. Just for a moment went a little rogue and they had to uninvite them from the program.Doug:Wow.Debra:Because the US State department really has… I mean, this is the US State department…Doug:Right.Debra:And it’s representing the United States.Doug:Right.Debra:And even though there are individuals in the United States that are very actively doing things on Twitter that may be you know, it’s not always healthy to do; they still have to even as the United States State department, they have to think about their brand and image and what they’re responsibility is to the US population. So…Doug:Right.Debra:It’s once again to leave that section out. Even though some people might know this, I believe you should follow people back. The days of you being a big corporate brand and we’re just going to fall at your feet because you’re this big corporate brand; those days are gone.Doug:Right.Debra:And it’s funny a lot of the corporations that I deal with, I have more followers on social media than they do.Doug:Yes.Debra:And they’ll say, “Well Debra, even though we’re this gigantic brand, nobody is following us.” And it’s like, well, what are you talking about on social media?Doug:Right. Exactly. Are you saying something that people want to hear. You know…Debra:Right.Doug:It’s really interesting. There’s a lot in there that you said. A couple of things I wanted to pull out, one is the idea that social media is a hot potato, right? So the idea that people know, I mean, you may know something intellectually or you may have heard something but truly knowing… I mean, you know, you could maybe understand something or just, there’s a difference between knowing and applying.Debra:Right.Doug:And I think this book gives people… you know, they know generally that social media is something they should be doing maybe, maybe, but they don’t have the knowledge of what you go deeper in the book. About how to do it, how to build a brand, why you should really do it.The other piece I wanted to say to you was to talk about, we talk about this all the time, it’s that fear that brands have that something is going to go wrong so it’s better to just not say anything. Can you speak on that a little bit?Debra:Yes. “I’m just not going to do anything because I might get in trouble.”Doug:Right.Debra:You can’t do that. You absolutely can’t do it because you must be on social media. That’s the way people consume data.Doug:Right.Debra:And you must be on there and you must be engaging in the conversations. Don’t just speak at us; engage with us…Doug:That’s right.Debra:Your customers are on social media. Once again, no matter if you’re talking business to business or business to consumer; your customers are on there. So, say that you’re a corporate brand that only sells to other corporations, those corporations are also on. And at some point in that life cycle, that chain I should say, the consumer is engaged. Because maybe you as a corporate brand only engage with other businesses but those are the businesses that are your customers, some of them are going to be engaging with consumers.Doug:That’s right.Debra:So you cannot not be engaged in the social media conversations. You just can’t do it these days. And if you do, the people are noticing it.Doug:That’s right.Debra:People are really noticing it and what they’re thinking is that you are not up with the times, you are not a brand that is paying attention. And people are making decisions about your brand so you can be afraid and do nothing or you can have this minimal approach where you’re going to post once a day or once a week…Doug:Right.Debra:And you’re going to just post about you. I always find it so interesting who brands are following. And so if I look at a brand and then the brand is… they have… I’m thinking of one brand in particular, they have like 47,000 followers and they’re following 123 people.Doug:Right.Debra:So I’m always curious what rated… why did those 123 accounts?Doug:Why are they so…Debra:Right. Because that’s curious to me. That right there…Doug:Yes.Debra:Is going to help me decide a little bit more about who you are as a brand. So, I will go and look and see who are these people and…Doug:Yes.Debra:A lot of times I’ll see they’re other parts of the organization you know because many organizations, corporate brands will have multiple Twitter handles or Facebooks.Doug:Right.Debra:And that gets a little bit confusing for us too but it’s okay. And so there’s like generally the mother brand. I’ll just use Microsoft who does a real good job on social media. So, you’ve got Microsoft, but then you have others. There’s another one called, I should know this one, MS Accessible or MS Enable. I should know I retweet this brand all the… this account all the time. So they have one specifically for accessibility that is talking about the work they’re doing and disability inclusion and stuff and it is…I’ll give you another example, Barclays. Barclays bank who is one of the most accessible and inclusive banks in the world. They have Barclays but then they also have Barclays Access which is the one that often I tag because I know this is the part of the organization who’s really talking to our community.Doug:Right.Debra:But, when I say something nice about Barclays, which I often do because I believe in this brand…Doug:Right.Debra:Even though I will say right now that they’re not a customer, they’re a partner I work with them a lot but I really believe in brands that are including our community. So, when I tag them, I will tag the main brand…Doug:Right.Debra:And then I’ll also tag the part of the brand that is talking to this community which is by the way an example of a brand that’s doing it right. Both of those brands; Microsoft and Barclays are doing, they’re doing a good job on social media. Talk to us.Doug:You know, it’s… so, I want to actually start segueing into talking about engagement which I know you talk about in the book as well but, I just want to say that you know, it’s like saying if I go out and I talk to people, I might say something wrong so I’ll never talk to anyone ever again. Right?Debra:Right. Right.Doug:Stop talking to your customers, stop talking to your potential clients because you might say something that offends them.Debra:Right. And so…Doug:Problem solved.Debra:Right. Problem solved so just don’t say anything and we’ll know for sure you’re not a leader.Doug:Right.Debra:And we’ll get really mad at you by the way and we will… and I’m not talking about me but the community.Doug:Right.Debra:The Twitter viewer, the social media universe, yes I realized I won’t be able to say that word without getting tongue tied but, we’ll notice and we’re really noticing. And I’ll tell you what really makes individuals mad is when you are a mine and I have some kind of customer situation and I’m asking you questions and you’re totally ignoring me.Doug:I was going to say, Oh and by the way silence sometimes speaks louder than words.Debra:Yes. Because we’ll fill in the blank for you.Doug:Yes.Debra:And it’s almost never going to be to your brand’s advantage.Doug:Yes.Debra:And then, if you continue to ignore people that are trying to figure something out; sometimes others will join in and it gets to be very problematic very very quickly. And when I was… when I was speaking at the State department the other day, a woman in the audience asked me a question, “well, what do you do if you’re attacked on social media? So, you’re trying to engage and we know we got to have engagement and you’re attacked on social media.” And it made me think of a brand that is one of my customers and they were attacked on social media.They were accused by… I don’t know who started it but, somebody accused them of funding a candidate’s political campaign which we get a little hot head in the US about this stuff so does everybody else but this was a US thing and it was a candidate that, man I won’t say which candidate but it was a candidate who was not very popular and who’s getting a lot of media attention. And so somebody accused this really large brand of giving him money so this corporate brand was bad too. And the Twitter storm, that hit was nasty and ugly and personal and…Doug:Yes.Debra:People were jumping on and the brand came to me and said, “Just want to let you know this is happening; you will have seen it and we would like you to stay out of It.” and I said, “But I’d like to weigh in because I don’t think it’s fair.” And they said, “we would actually prefer that you stay out of it Debra because we think that your voice for the inclusion of people with disabilities is very valuable and we actually don’t want you to get tarnished in the fight.” And the fight was not even about the community of people with disabilities but they… this brand was trying to protect me and I’m a big girl, I can handle it.Doug:O right. Exactly.Debra:I can handle it but at the same time I honor them. and so what they did was, and this is what we talk about in the book too, you’re accused of something on social media, what do you do?Doug:Right.Debra:You must respond. The longer you don’t respond…Doug:Right.Debra:The worse it’s going to get.Doug:Right.Debra:And so you must respond. And so what they did, they’re a corporation, they went to their legal and their communications people and they came up with a response and they posted the response. Well of course, the response was good enough for the people that are now… now they’ve got people trolling. We call people that are just going in and say really nasty stuff for no particular reason, they’re called trolls on the internet.Doug:Yes.Debra:And we say don’t feed the trolls. And so, if you have a legitimate complaint about something; that’s not trolling. But if you’re just… I have somebody… it happens all the time because I have so many followers on Twitter but, the other day I saw this sort of nasty little comment come through my feed and they had tagged me and I think BBC News and it was just a real nasty real negative comment. Not directed at me; it was directed at the story that BBC had done but… and so, I looked at it and I thought, “is there any substance here?” and I actually went to the person’s account and I looked at their account and I saw that they just do this all day long. They just pick various topics and they just attack attack attack.So I thought, okay cool, so I block them. I did not respond. Do not feed the trolls and BBC News didn’t respond either. But I’m not sure exactly how helpful things like that are on social media but you can pretty much say whatever you want on social media.Doug:That’s right.Debra:You know. And the worse that might happen is maybe your account will be shut down if you’re saying really mean ugly things but social media is going through a major probably very necessary major major shift right now. With the…Doug:Exactly.Debra:Fake news and the European laws that say you know, you can’t do certain things. I have some friends of mine in Europe say, “well, I notice a lot of the European accounts on Twitter that were considered spammers were deleted but not the US ones.”Doug:Right.Debra:Well, right now, the Europeans are the ones that have been really forward thinking and created these laws…Doug:We’re going to get there. I mean…Debra:We’re going to get there and this is going to happen but I don’t really blame Twitter of trying to follow the laws in Europe.Doug:Right.Debra:You know say what you want about Twitter but they’re trying to follow those laws and…Doug:That’s right.Debra:They’re trying to deal with this rapidly rapidly changing environment.Doug:Boy, isn’t that true? I mean, I think about… it’s funny as we’re having this conversation, I was thinking back to one of the earliest conversations that we ever had about 10 years ago and we were talking about access for people with disabilities and man, I mean 10 years ago, think about what Facebook was 10 years ago. There was no Instagram. Was there Twitter? I think there was but no one was really…Debra:Yes. Yes, the social media is about… I think it’s going on about 12 years.Doug:Yes.Debra:I mean, to be honest, the first social media if you really want to be a social media nerd which I am, I believe the first social media company was formed in 1998 according to Wikipedia. I forgot the name of it.Doug:Wow.Debra:But most of… most of social media is about 12 years old.Doug:Yes.Debra:Amazing. It’s funny, I have my books behind me as a good PR person would. And I have this one book, “Finding Your Voice Using Social Media” that’s actually I took out of print.Doug:Yes.Debra:And it’s ancient.Doug:Right. And it’s not that old.Debra:It’s 2013.Doug:Right.Debra:2013 and it’s ancient.Doug:But the world has changed so much.Debra:Yes.Doug:Yes.Debra:I mean, there’s still some good data in it but the reality is, since 2013…Doug:Right.Debra:Social media has changed so much.Doug:Right.Debra:So…Doug:And brands need to keep up with how people are talking, how communities are engaging, how you know, they need to keep up. The idea of just you know this is a hot potato and we’re not going to address it is not a functional… it’s not a functional attitude.Debra:No. No. and you’ve got to understand how to use social media too.Doug:Right.Debra:In my book that I was just referencing, in my book I said, I know you shouldn’t have favorites but my favorite medium is LinkedIn and it really was. I love LinkedIn at that time and I love the LinkedIn groups and there was so much great engagement. And then things shifted and I thought, maybe I love Twitter best, maybe I love Facebook best, maybe I love Instagram. Or really Debra, who cares. But what’s happened… but LinkedIn right now is being amazing again.Doug:Yes.Debra:I’m seeing such amazing rich engagement on LinkedIn.Doug:Yes.Debra:So the… it’s interesting to me the differences between the different mediums…Doug:Yes.Debra:Because I believe you need to be on them all as a brand.Doug:Yes.Debra:You need to be in them all. But they have enough uniqueness about them that you can build upon your brand message in different ways on different ones.Doug:Right…Debra:Choose brands…Doug:Some are more visual, some are more story.Debra:Right. Yes. Pinterest. Pinterest is a perfect example.Doug:Yes.Debra:Is Pinterest even social media? Yes. Yes but they… so it’s very interesting the different pieces and I have a very, I thought very interesting interview in the book about Pinterest with August.Doug:August de los Reyes. Yes.Debra:Yes. What a brilliant mind that gentleman has. And so…Doug:Who by the way is the… he’s the head of design at Pinterest we should say.Debra:Yes.Doug:And if you haven’t listened to the episode, go back and listen to our conversation… your conversation with August.Debra:Yes. Well, because you were joining me behind the scenes on this conversations. But, brilliant. Brilliant interesting conversations. So, I think if you are not following the rule, there’s a lot of rules and once again, they’re shifting.Doug:Yes.Debra:They’re shifting and also, can we call them rules? So, it’s just very interesting to watch and I understand how scary this could be. I also think it’s interesting, some of the corporate brands that I deal with, any time they put a tweet out, it has to be approved by you know, general council or…Doug:Right.Debra:You know this group. Well, you know, things are happening every second on social media.Doug:So you’re going to be so slow.Debra:So as you’re waiting…Doug:You’re going to be too slow.Debra:You’re going to be too slow. But at the same time, there’s risks for not getting things vetted. And we’ve seen some really scary things that have happened when the social media team says whatever they think without getting it vetted. So it’s a very interesting real problem…Doug:Yes.Debra:And the woman had said to me, “what do you do if… what do you tell a brand if they get attacked?”Doug:Right.Debra:And you know, just going full circle back to this conversation and it’s like you have to join the conversation, you have to explain your point without being…Doug:Defensive.Debra:It’s like any other thing, defensive, don’t make excuses, do not attack back, do not try to blame others.Doug:Right.Debra:It really is just what you do in any other human situation except you happen to be being watched by millions of people.Doug:Right.Debra:Might want to just mess with you and at some point, you just got… and this is what happen with this one brand, they did not do what they were accused of but they were being judged you know…Doug:Yes.Debra:Court opinion, the public opinion and they were like lamenting with me and I said, “well, the good / bad news is they’re going to get bored and they’re going to be on to somebody else to rip apart pretty soon.”Doug:Yes.Debra:And of course it happened. It went on for about a week for them and it was hard to watch. You know, we talked about it before, we had a whole episode one time about what happened with United Airlines with the passenger and all of that stuff.Doug:You know what, United is just the poster child of what not to do.Debra:I know. That’s… yes. It’s… that’s just… you know, Target, even though Target has done amazing things to include people with disabilities to make things accessible, they were one of the biggest lawsuits and they got talked about all over the world. So that’s unfortunately become the poster brand of not getting in trouble even though Target, we have a lot more positive things to say about Target. But it’s… unfortunately, that’s just part of being in the public eye and you cannot say…Doug:But United didn’t get in trouble. United didn’t get in trouble because they were on social media. They got in trouble because they didn’t do it right. And that’s what I think… that’s part of… the big part of what you’re saying I think is like you know, you have to just get it right. And like you said, there’s not necessarily… like it’s not that black and white but there are principles. There are principles that can help you to do better.Debra:I agree. And I would also say with United Airlines, instead of did they do it right? Well, the CEO came out and tried to stand by his employees which by the way, that’s not a bad thing.Doug:Right.Debra:Right? You know, because his employees had followed the protocol. It wasn’t what was wanted to be heard.Doug:Right.Debra:What I thought was interesting and I would not have done is the brands, the very well-known corporate brands that jumped on the back on their misery and said well, you know, I mean. And I won’t call out any brands but that actually took advantage of the attack that was happening with United.Doug:They did.Debra:That I would not… I would have recommended to my clients do not do that. Do not jump on the back of another brand’s misery…Doug:a little bit of shocked and afraid as they say. You know like…Debra:Yes. Yes. And if nothing else, don’t do it because I’d be afraid of karma.Doug:Right. Exactly…Debra:But it would also what makes you looks small. There was one brand that did it that I was really surprised they did it and I thought I…Doug:Yes. I know which one you’re talking about.Debra:Yes. And it was funny… it was funny but the…Doug:They’re always funny…Debra:The United States. Yes…Doug:Right.Debra:Yes. United States have left our way into some of these really ridiculous bad situations we’re in right now and I won’t go down the political path. But, I think sometimes when we’re laughing at the expense of someone else, I was told as a little kid that that’s really not good manners and that’s not very healthy to the society.Doug:No.Debra:But. Yes. So you’ve got those issues too.Doug:Debra, give us… before… I want to make sure that before we ran out of time today, can you give us some tips… I mean, you’ve given us a lot of things to think about in terms of if you’re you know, how to build a community, what to do if you’re attacked on social media. Can you say a little bit more about… I do think that corporations really struggle with how to build engagement. So, can you say a little bit about what should I be posting and then how do I get people to actually engage?Debra:I agree. And what I’ve found is that some of the brands which I think are really smart, what they’re doing is they will make sure that they have content available that is relevant to whatever say month it is and I’ll give you an example. In October, October is disability employment awareness month and so… or an even more timely example is yesterday, when we’re filming this, yesterday was global accessibility awareness day. So, GAAD, G-A-A-D and so we saw a lot of brands; Microsoft did it, IBM did it, a lot of… Barclays did it, Atos did it but they had content yesterday on social media that was specific to celebrating accessibility so that we can all be included. That’s a really good way to engage with different communities.Every single month, like I believe March is Down syndrome awareness month; there are also other things that are that month. Also, there’s an autism month, there’s a mental health month and there’s international day of disabilities so it’s not just international. So there’s ways that you can do with all these different communities by engaging in the topics on those particular days or months you know. Because generally today I think March 21 is Down syndrome awareness day but, we take the whole month. You know, can we please have the whole month?So, you can provide content and engage with the community and the community will engage back with you if you are putting out content about our community and how you support our community you know volunteer programs and stuff that your employees do to support the communities. But that’s one good way to engage; just some examples. I give a lot more examples on the book but that’s one example of how you can engage with the community.When you know the community is really going to be active because it’s our day, it’s our month; it’s a day that we’re celebrating international day of the women or things like that. So that’s a… and so being up and knowing what the days are. Not just in the United States but globally especially if you’re a multinational corporation that are in multiple countries. You need to know what those countries celebrate and why you need to join in these conversations. That’s an excellent way pretty easy way to engage with different communities as one example.Doug:And it doesn’t cost a lot of money. Right?Debra:Yes.Doug:It doesn’t take…Debra:No.Doug:It doesn’t even take that much time.Debra:No. it really doesn’t and you can just join the conversations.Doug:Yes.Debra:Look at the feeds and look at the conversations. And I believe that you know, we should be nice to each other on social media. I try to be nice to people in real life, right?So, when I’m going through the checkout line at the grocery store, I try not to be on my cellphone. I try to acknowledge there is… if I went into a line where there was a human being, that there’s a human being checking out my groceries and you know, who are they and kind of the day they’re having. I believe in engaging with people. Well, you do the same thing on social media. And no matter what marketing you’re doing; you know branding things you’re doing, you can always… you’re always going to take that to social media to socialize it as we say.So, I think there’s… sometimes if you try to think about who you are as an individual and of course who are these brands? They’re individuals, right?Doug:Right.Debra:And so, how do you want to be treated? How would you want somebody to talk to you? How would you want somebody to tell… how would you want to be a corporate brand like Google. Google, I love Google.I love Google. They’re so creative and innovative but they really are good about engaging with us.Doug:Yes.Debra:And some brands, they don’t engage at all.Doug:Right. And it’s really missing an opportunity. They’re…Debra:It is…Doug:The good part is…Debra:Sending a bad message.Doug:Right. There’s so much room to grow and you can’t just say, “Well, we’ll get to it when we get to it.” Because…Debra:Right.Doug:It’s part… part of the core of your business is to communicate, it’s to build that relationship. People buy from brands if they know, like and trust…Debra:Yes. And the millennials have said and I have statistics in the book, the millennials have said, “We will pay more money to do business with the corporation that we believe is socially responsible. I will not work for you if I don’t think you’re a good brand. I will leave you.” in a second, the millennials will leave you if they do not… and we’ve seen some accidents of some really big brands. It’s like, “what do you mean you did this to women? No. I’m out.” so, you lose your talent. Oh, that’s huge. But I do want to say one more thing.One thing that I did in the book even though the book is… you can… I wrote it in a way so that you could pick up any community and think about the community with all these tips. I happen to use these examples all through the book; the community of people with disabilities because that’s the community I really love and care about. So there’s this one chapter where I really talk about who is the disability community from an international perspective. You know, what are the numbers, what are we talking about, what are the definitions.So there’s one chapter that’s specific; all about disabilities but at the same time, the examples I was giving during the book. I also used many disability inclusion accessibility examples because that’s just the lens I was writing from but once again, you can pick up the tips and you can apply it to any community or any cause. Say that you want to support breast cancer awareness month which I think is February pink or you want to support autism which there’s a purple aspect to that.You know, there are things you could do that where you don’t have to stick to just this one community that I’m talking about even though it’s a billion person community plus but I wrote in a way so that people could pick up the tips and they could apply it anywhere. They could also apply it to their own personal brand. So you’re somebody that wants to get… I have a friend of mine who has a daughter who has very serious allergies and she said, “I want to be doing what you’re doing but with allergies.” Well, you can use tips in the book to become known more as an expert in allergies.Doug:Debra, I want to make sure… I want to make sure… first of all, people need to get the book. So, they can go to Amazon, right?Debra:Yes.Doug:And search for Inclusion Branding.Debra:Right. Or Debra Ruh…Doug:Or Debra Ruh…Debra:D-E-B-R-A R-U-H. Or you can go to our website, and you can find it on the website; it will point you and I’ve got it, right now it’s in print and it’s in Kindle and it’s available all over the world.Doug:And we’re working on the audiobook.Debra:And we’re working on the Audible book…Doug:Yes.Debra:And I believe my producer said, “Yes, do it without talking so fast Debra. Slow down.” So, I will be working on that this week and…Doug:Yes, we’ll get that.Debra:I’m learning to speak eloquently and slowly instead of rushing through my words so…Doug:Well, I just want to… I also want to say to our listeners, if you enjoyed this program and we’ve had so many different… I mean, we had a… we’ve done over a hundred episodes and we’ve reached, it’s like over 80 countries with this program that if we are looking for sponsors to help us to continue this good work, to help us get the word out, to help us provide valuable content to the community and if you value the work that we’re doing and you’d like to be a part of this… and by the way, it’s a value proposition because we’re going to push you out to a whole lot of people and what a great way if you really want to reach the community of persons with disabilities and be on people that are interested in Human Potential, we encourage you to contact us.So, what would be the best way Debra? What should we give them in terms of reaching out if someone’s interested?Debra:I think… I think reaching out to you Doug.Doug:Yes. Okay. Let me give you my email. It’s dougforesta d-o-u-g-f-o-r-e-s-t-a at gmail dot com and just put sponsorship or sponsor in the subject line and we’d be happy to talk to you about it. But we’re definitely looking for partners who have a product or service or brand that is good fit for us and we’d love to feature you too globally. Really to our global audience so I just wanted to share that.Debra, thank you so much. As always, great conversation. I really did flash back to, wow. Look how much the world has changed. Yes.Debra:It’s changed. It’s so fast. It’s amazing. So, thank you so much Doug. Thank you for interviewing me. That was a… that was a fun way to do it. And thank you to everybody that is watching and supporting the program. We really are very grateful for you so. And, if you want a good book on inclusion branding…Doug:That’s right.Debra:We’d love for you to support us. So…Doug:That’s right.Debra:Thank you very much everyone. Buh-bye.Doug:Thank you.Male Speaker:You’ve been listening to Human Potential at Work with Debra Ruh. To learn more about Debra and how she can help your organization, visit . If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode and you want to make sure that you don’t miss any future episodes, go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast, Human Potential at Work. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll be back next week with the new episode. ................
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